A month after Hamas militants from Gaza attacked an Israeli music festival last October, the Hebrew rap duo Ness & Stilla premiered “HarbuDarbu” on YouTube. The military hype song celebrates Israeli forces waging war in Gaza and has drawn over 25 million views; its critics have termed the song a violent and hateful anti-Palestinian “genocide … Read more
In early 2022, two Google policy staffers met with a trio of women victimized by a scam that resulted in explicit videos of them circulating online—including via Google search results. The women were among the hundreds of young adults who responded to ads seeking swimsuit models only to be coerced into performing in sex videos … Read more
Google is introducing AI features to Gmail, through a new Gemini side panel — Gemini being Google’s own AI model — set to make emailing easier for a number of users. The virtual assistant side panel will also be integrated into Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drive. But the tech giant said it would only … Read more
Two activists disrupted the Amazon Web Services Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday to protest Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google’s $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. The protest, which interrupted the keynote speech from Dave Levy, AWS worldwide public sector vice president, is the latest in a series of recent protests that … Read more
Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images Google is testing facial recognition technology for office security “to help prevent unauthorized individuals from gaining access to our campuses,” according to a description of the program that was viewed by CNBC. The initial test is taking place at one of Alphabet’s sites in Kirkland, Washington, a Seattle … Read more
In 2021, AI research lab DeepMind announced the development of its first digital biology neural network, AlphaFold. The model was capable of accurately predicting the 3D structure of proteins, which determines the functions that these molecules play. “We’re just floating bags of water moving around,” says Pushmeet Kohli, VP of research at DeepMind. “What makes … Read more
A Waymo rider-only robotaxi is seen during a test ride in San Francisco on Dec. 9, 2022. Paresh Dave | Reuters Waymo robotaxis are now open to all users in San Francisco, expanding the self-driving ride-hailing service, which has been available in the city to a limited number of riders. In a blog post on … Read more
Image: ChargePoint Nobody asked for this AI search bullshit, Google. Not only are the AI generated responses demonstrably worse than normal, they’re infringing on intellectual property rights, killing traditional media, and—thanks to a new Jacobin report we now know—soaking up gobs of electricity in the process. Artificial intelligence-powered search engines are an all-around bad idea, … Read more
Apple has become the first big tech company to be charged with breaking the European Union’s new digital markets rules, three days after the tech giant said it would not release artificial intelligence in the bloc due to regulation. On Monday, the European Commission said that Apple’s App Store was preventing developers from communicating with … Read more
The Eiffel Tower is 330 meters tall, and the nearest pizza parlor is 1.3 miles from my house. These facts were astoundingly easy to ascertain. All I had to do was type some words into Google, and I didn’t even have to spell them right. For the vast majority of human history, this is not … Read more
